It’s not often you get the opportunity for a guided tour of an area you’ve known for years, only to find you didn’t know it nearly as well as you thought.
As with most food tours, the one I took, along with a friend, with Ahoy New York Food Tours, left me feeling well-fed—I also felt as if I had taken a college course in New York food and cultural history.
The tour, with our guide Liz, focused on two of New York’s most popular cuisines, Chinese and Italian, and in their most traditional center, Manhattan’s Chinatown and Little Italy, once separate, but now overlapping and with only a tiny Italian community remaining.
But what unraveled as we ate our way through nearly a dozen places and samples was a much more complex story, which Liz recounted in detail and with passion. We often talk of New York as a ‘melting pot’ of people from different backgrounds, but she reminded us that ‘Italian’ as we think of it came to America as Sicilian, Neapolitan, Calabrese, Roman, Tuscan and more. What we see today is a melting within the melting.
The same is true, she pointed out, for China. Chinese immigration to America came in different waves, and from different parts of China, sometimes with almost no overlap among their food cultures.
In New York, and other cities, the foods, and sometimes the families, blended, producing new dishes and styles… sometimes aimed not at their own communities but at making a living serving the larger American population with dishes like ‘Chop Suey’ that never existed anywhere in China.
As she pointed out, that’s true among the various Italian groups as well: They created a cuisine here that shares much with Italian regions and much that is unique here. Even things as common as pasta were different, with preferences for dried or fresh.
In my 20s, 60 or so years ago, I lived in lower Manhattan and ate often in the area where we toured. It was a bit of a culture shock to realize how ‘old school’ my memories had become as Liz discussed the changes that have happened just in the past 40 or so years, for both groups.
Among the changes that have come with changes in immigration patterns in that period is the arrival of Hong Kong-style sponge cakes, such as the one above from Kam Hing Coffee Shop. That green color isn’t a dye: it comes from Pandan, an herb widely used in Southeast Asia.
Moving on, but not very far, we veered into Italian food territory, with a stop at Columbus Park, a spot with connections to old New York history as the Five Points, and connected to the early last-century history and connections of both communities; Liz pulled the story together for us, with illustration.
And then on to the Piemonte Ravioli Company, which has been in business since 1920. Over the years it’s developed an amazing range of pasta varying not only in shapes but in flavor and contents—and therefore color!
Our taste treat at Piemonte was soft, almost melting gnocchi in a flavorful ragu. I could have eaten much more of it, but we still had more stops to make.
Not far away, Liz guided us to another long-time survivor, Di Palo’s Fine Foods. Unlike many businesses that closed as the neighborhood changed and younger generations found other occupations, this family pulled its younger members in to continue it.
Liz, with a true New York ‘what can I tell you?’ expression…
Our final stop, and the one least changed from my memories, was at Ferrara’s, a large bakery and cafe that was often the last stop before home on a night out. At this stop, we had our dessert, a small but tasty cannoli, filled with a rich ricotta-based filling. It’s about all we had room left for!
We were guests of Ahoy New York on the tour, but my opinions and memories are, of course, my own. I would definitely recommend this tour, especially if Liz is your guide. Ahoy also offers several other New York food tours. For more information, click HERE
